All
cooks have their tools. For some, that means knives and rolling pins.
For Philadelphia Chef Fritz Blank, it includes a library of 10,000 cookery
books he uses as often as any utensil. Chef Fritz taps his cookery library
to create menus that are deeply rooted in the diverse culinary traditions
of Europe and America. The music aficionado and former dairy farmer, clinical
microbiologist and military officer collects books in all these fields,
but his culinary collection has become a Philadelphia institution.

Here
scholarly tomes vie with community cookbooks, entire newspaper food sections,
menus and recipe pamphlets for shelf space. Even ephemera such as advertising
postcards are not beneath notice in Blank’s eclectic and egalitarian
library.

Born
in “East Philadelphia” (Pennsauken, New Jersey), Blank learned
to cook at his grandmother Mary Blank’s apron strings, and food
has remained a constant in his life. His foray into restaurateuring was
inspired by a series of dinners with friends in the early 1970’s.
Cooking directly from the 1969 Great Dinners from Life, Blank
recreated every menu in the book. His guests’ enthusiastic claims
that he should open a restaurant proved his first push from cook to chef. Great
Dinners includes international menus such as Brazilian, Belgian
and French and gives precise explanations of how and why dishes work,
the kinds of scientific framing Blank still serves up when teaching his
own recipes at his Philadelphia restaurant Deux Chemineés.

On going
projects -- stacks and piles of books, menus, articles and scrawled notes
-- mark most surfaces in the library. Here, a tentative menu for a Verdi
tribute dinner; there, experimental formulae for firmer watermelon pickles;
over there, a series of notes on gelling agents. Like a symphony maestro,
Blank is at the center of this bustling research, comparing recipes in
original languages, FedExing hot soup across state lines or taking notes
on dishes for staff meals.

What's
with the Cows?

The
library’s small herd of cows has been growing since Chef Fritz’s
undergraduate days as a dairy farmer. Since then, cows have held
a special place in the chef’s heart and form a continuing decorative
motif throughout his library and home.

From
Popular Culture to Learned Treatises

Clusius’ Latin
dissertation on Hungarian mushrooms, originally published in
1601, separates over one hundred species into edible and nonedible
fungi. Botanists of the time tended to describe few species and
commingled safe and poisonous ones. Clusius, who detested the
smell and taste of mushrooms, nonetheless gives examples of Hungarian
preparations.

Keeping
Track

Longtime
librarian Elsie Cundy registers new acquisitions in a
thick handwritten ledger. She then pastes one of five
personalized bookplates on each of the 10,000 books.

Visitors
to the library often ask about the hundreds of College Inn broth cans
supporting book-laden shelves. Why broth cans? “Because,” a poker-faced
Blank says, “they are cheaper than tomato juice cans.”

Say
Cheese

Blank’s
library includes thousands of culinary knickknacks
and packaging examples. Not surprisingly, bovine themes
arise again in cheese books and ephemera.

I
Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Pork Loin.
Postcard. Des Moines, IA: National Pork Board, 2001.

Kurti,
Nicholas and Giana, (eds.).But the Crackling is Superb an Anthology on Food and Drink
by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society.
Bristol, England, Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1988.